Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #267980 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

From Publishers Weekly
When President Eisenhower famously warned against the military-industrial complex, he largely meant the Department of Defense–funded programs of the RAND Corporation. Abella (coauthor, Shadow Enemies: Hitler's Secret Terrorist Plot Against the United States) presents a sometimes dry but thorough account of this think-tank, which he asserts not only played a key role in the U.S.'s biggest foreign misadventures in Vietnam and Iraq but also, through its development of rational choice theory, has affected every aspect of our lives, not necessarily for the better. Abella, working with the cooperation of the usually secretive organization, details RAND'S history, from analyst Herman Kahn's energetic support of a virtually unrestrained nuclear arms buildup to the organization's role in sparking America's involvement in Vietnam and the current war in Iraq. But even more, Abella says, RAND theorists' notion that self-interest, rather than collective interests like religion, governs human behavior has influenced every aspect of our society, from health care to tax policy. The RAND Corporation continues today—as brilliant, controversial and, in Abella's view, amoral as ever—with the complicity of all Americans. If we look in the mirror, Abella concludes, we will see that RAND is every one of us. The question is, what are we going to do about it? 8 pages of b&w photos. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
A crisp history of the world's most influential think tank, which the Soviet publication Pravda once called the "academy of science and death."

The Manhattan Project proved to the military during World War II the efficacy of assistance from independent civilian scientists. Seeking to maintain that link and understanding the need to cope with peacetime threats to national security, Air Force hot shots, including the legendary Generals Henry Harley "Hap" Arnold and Curtis LeMay, helped to found RAND (for "research and development"). Throughout the next half-century, RAND's intellectual gunslingers--its researchers and advisors have won 27 Nobel Prizes--expanded their role and helped set large portions of America's military and political agenda. RAND's detractors accuse the corporation of subordinating morality to the achievement of U.S. government policy, of operating wholly without conscience and of practically inventing the Cold War. Los Angeles Times contributor and novelist Abella (Final Acts, 2000, etc.) takes a swipe at the problematic implications for the country of RAND's seeming amorality, but he deals far more successfully with the corporation's history, particularly the early years, and the procession of larger-than-life personalities who passed through RAND's portals and who influenced the nation's thinking far more than any single policy paper the institute produced. RAND's luminaries have included the brilliant mathematician John von Neumann, thermonuclear war expert (and model for Dr. Strangelove) Herman Kahn, national-security expert and Cold War strategist Albert Wohlstetter, Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, and even the humorist Leo Rosten. Its theorists have contributed to our everyday lexicon such words and phrases as "fail-safe," "doomsday machine," "systems analysis," "futurology," "zero-sum game" and "prisoner's dilemma." How many enemy factories can we destroy with the kind of aircraft we possess? After a nuclear exchange, would the living truly envy the dead? Paid to think the unthinkable, RAND's analysts and their mission come off here as simultaneously marvelous and horrible.

As good a look as we're likely to get about an organization where, Ellsberg notwithstanding, keeping secrets is second nature. -- Kirkus Reviews

Review
"An entertaining and fast-paced account... Abella excels... in his descriptions of the colorful characters who populated RAND."

Customer Reviews

Penetrating revisionist view of American foreign policy
First of all, the book is about a lot more than foreign policy, but that's what I find most interesting about RAND and what I think really shines in this compelling history. Yeah, yeah, there's social science that RAND did, too, and that's good to know, but where the writing really comes alive is with the great larger than life characters who were at the center of the Cold War -- people like Albert Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn, Bernard Brodie, Paul Wolfowitz, Daniel Ellsberg, Donald Rumsfeld, and on and on. A lot of the material has been glancingly covered elsewhere, but never has one book presented the whole story. And with the whole story in one place, it becomes shockingly clear what enormous influence RAND's "soldiers of reason" had in every administration for over 60 years.

It's a relief that for most of the book Abella just presents history -- story after story of all the players and their deeds (and more important, their incredibly influential ideas). It's also a relief that at the end Abella sums up the achievements and failings of RAND's systems analysis and approach to problems by stating: "the problem with rational choice theory is that it is not rational. It fails to comprehend the world as it is..." Exactly. One need look no further than Viet Nam (or Iraq!) for proof.

A very good secret history of American foreign policy during and after the Cold War.

Interesting, but odd take on RAND & think tanks
This book is a mixture of a history of the origin of RAND, combined with a biography on several of the more noted personalities, especially those connected to the neo-con movement, and ending with an odd discussion on Chalabi and the Iraq war.

I found the book interesting, but would disagree with his attitude towards RAND. The book focuses on the personalities of some of the key people, with Albert Wohlstetter being perhaps the most significant person throughout the book. I learned a lot about many of these people, including Daniel Elsberg. I do think that Abella is overly critical of the methodology of RAND, including rational choice theory and systems analysis. Rational choice has been the key economic model for the last 50 years and has demonstrated its explanatory power in numerous cases. And systems analysis has also shown how models from operations research and other disciplines have led to substantial improvements in society. I think the author takes several of the people at RAND who were practitioners of these approaches and with their personal and political agendas. He also attaches to RAND many people who have fairly tangential connections to it.

For example, he ends with a chapter on the Iraq war and the role of Chalabi. He gives credit & blame to RAND indirectly because several of his backers had RAND connections.

author of reason?
Soldiers Of Reason may have been okay if it were the biography of Wohlstetter. As it is, it resembles someone who has visited the Louvre for five days and writes a book about what Europe is like.
To consider Wolfowitz and Perle as RANDites is absurd. C Rice came a bit closer, but not much. Rumsfeld was on the Board but only on the Board, and that was a long time ago.
There was never a fist fight in any manangement meeting. Shapley (a member of the National Academy of Science) and Belman were mathemeticians, not an economist and a physicist. The correct decription of RAND by Pravda was The Academy of Death and Destruction. These are minor errors and are perhaps to be expected in any book. It always is a plus, however, for authors to do their homwork.
The author makes RAND look like a group of wild eyed hawks bent on death and destruction without a thought for human lives or social consequences.. An assemblage of Dr Strangeloves. To imply that ethics and morals was a luxury that the researchers couldn't afford or chose not to address is an insult to the vast majority of RAND researchers.
My guess is that most of the real RANDites will gasp in horror at what is portrayed of the organization. Yes, a great deal of emphasis was on the cold war and how to fight it, but also how to avoid it. To imply that our current policy in the Middle East is a direct result of RAND is another absurdity. There may be many who have taken what they wish to further from some of the studies performed at RAND, but there are different interpretations and indeed different studies to the contrary. Those mentioned above as RANDites who never were, may have been influenced by Wohlstetter but their work should not be represented as part of the history of RAND and their philosophies differ considerably from the majority of RANDites of that era.
No mention was made of the System Development Division, comprised almost entirely of psychologists who studied much of what the author says never happened at RAND. The Division spun off and formed the System Development Corporation and rapidly outgrew the parent. How could someone doing a so called history of RAND not include this?
No mention was made of the tremendous contribution in Artificial Intelligence which had much of its beginning at RAND involving Newell, Shaw and Simon as well as Minsky from MIT who was a consultant.
The entire computing field including programming (linear, dynamic and heuristic) perhaps was furthered by RAND as much or more than any other organization including IBM. The first professional computing societies were originally headed by people such as Paul Armer, Willis Ware and others from RAND
Computing as we know it today was very largley a result of the early efforts at RAND.
The really historic contributions made by the Information Sciences Department and the Mathematics Department (later merged into one) were not mentioned.
But no, we hear almost only of how Herman and Albert and few others did such damage with their concept of rational choice.
Studies at RAND included the first (outside of the Secret Service ) study and design of Presidential protection and RAND played a key role in the security of the 1984 Olympics.
Machine translation and was largely inaugurated at RAND.
Tom Lincoln began some of the very first definitive work on the treatment of leukemia.
Much work was done to avoid unauthorized lanching of nuclear weapons and assisstance was given to the DOD in establishing what at the time was known as The Human Reliability Program to ensure the behavioral soundness of those with access to those weapons. Safeguards such as the launch enabling system was of real concern within the corporation and contributions were made to the Air Force to develop such a system.
Cost analysis and a myriad of other novel sophisticated management approaches in the various commands were presented and adopted by the Air Force.
The Logistics Department made many substantial contributions to the Air Force.
Many such studies resulted in almost monumental savings of tax dollars.
The role RAND played in counterterrorism was hardly recognized for its significance, particularly its role in counter nuclear terrorism. Brian Jenkins could well be called the father of counterterrorism in this country, not only in his and his team's continued studies and analysis
but in giving the rest of the various agencies (starting, at first, with the Department of State) a jump start in combatting this threat.
The New York City debacle was fairly well covered. The eight or so people who first presenteed the concept to the Mayor (not the other way around) at a breakfast at Gracie Mansion envisioned the same type of atmosphere that was enjoyed at RAND Santa Monica (and Washington). That was not to be, and the head of the effort was not a researcher of the parent corporation. Many thought that this doomed it from the beginning. The effort seemed to be more of a job shop than research. And while it was an experiment in what might be accomplished with a RAND- like approach to the problems and compexities of running a large city, it failed.
Almost no mention was made in the book to the contributions to the Health field. And there have been many.
There are countless other studies too numerous to mention, and contributions of a much more benign nature that Rand addressed that were not covered in the book.
Instead, we read continuously all about a few people (admittedly influencal) many not ever even RANDites, and get a picture that is certainly not representative of this great corporation. To do so sadly did a very major diservice to the RAND corporation and the many researchers who will remember its history in a completely different way.


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